The Speaker of the Slovak parliament, Peter Pellegrini, has completed his transition to the presidency. (See report on the first round here.) In the runoff election held on Saturday he was victorious with 53.1% of the vote, about 165,000 votes ahead of his opponent, Ivan Korčok. He is to be sworn in on 15 June, replacing incumbent Zuzana Čaputová, who is retiring after a single term.
Pellegrini’s party, Hlas-SD, governs as a junior partner in coalition with Smer-SD, from which it split off in 2020. At the time, that seemed a reaction against the corruption and authoritarianism of Smer-SD’s leader, current prime minister Robert Fico, who had been under fire for a number of scandals, especially surrounding the 2018 murder of journalist Ján Kurciak.
Hlas-SD promised to be more of a pro-European social democratic party. But Pellegrini’s credentials in that regard were already suspect; he had previously been Fico’s loyal lieutenant, serving as prime minister prior to the 2020 election. And despite the shock of the invasion of Ukraine, the differences between the two men turn out to have been more cosmetic and susceptible to compromise.
In last year’s parliamentary election Hlas-SD won the balance of power between Smer-SD and its far-right allies on the one hand, and the liberal and pro-Ukrainian forces (with which both Korčok and Čaputová are aligned) on the other. The more liberal bloc was larger, but Smer-SD was the single largest party, so Fico was given the first chance to form a government, and he and Pellegrini quickly came to terms. It’s reasonable to assume that Fico’s support for Pellegrini to take the presidency was a quid pro quo.
Having a sympathetic president will remove a major check on Fico’s power. The position is mostly ceremonial, but its powers can be of critical importance in a crisis – which is why presidential elections tend to be hotly contested in eastern Europe and much less so in the west. And Fico has made little secret of his plans to take Slovakia down the same authoritarian road that Viktor Orbán has pioneered in neighboring Hungary: the need to deal with coalition partners, even friendly ones, may still restrain him a little, but the immediate future for the country looks grim.
Certainly Pellegrini seems to have had a change of front when it comes to Ukraine. Having initially promised to ensure that Slovakia continued its pro-western orientation, he attacked Korčok during the campaign for being a warmonger, playing (like Orbán) on the largely imaginary threat of local troops being committed to Ukraine. Slovakia, however, is not a major player, and it had already sent Ukraine as much equipment and ammunition as it could under the previous government.
The news from eastern Europe isn’t all bad. Poland, which threw out its authoritarian government last October, went back to the polls on Sunday for local elections. (They should have been held last year, but were postponed to avoid clashing with the national election.) Voters reaffirmed their decision, giving the new government a boost at local level.
In October, the three groups forming the new coalition government won 53.7% of the vote between them; the right-wing Law & Justice party and its allies had 35.4%, with most of the rest going to the far-right Confederation with 7.2%. At the local elections, using the aggregate table at Wikipedia, those numbers are barely changed: 51.2%, 34.3% and 7.2%. (An exit poll reported at Politico said 51.9%, 33.7% and 7.5%.)
At the previous local election, in 2018, Law & Justice won control of seven of the 16 provinces (voivodeships), although it subsequently lost Silesia due to defections. It looks as if that has now been reduced to five, with the government parties picking up Łódź; they have also kept control of the mayoralties in most of the country’s major cities. (Official results are all here, although some familiarity with Polish helps.)
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